Miami’s Liberty City seeks economic boost from its rich history

Looking to boost Liberty City’s economy, a historic preservation group is looking to preserve more properties.

The theory? A site can become a tourist destination after it is preserved, says Edwin Sheppard, manager of the Historic Hampton House. This will have an economic influence on the location as millions of people travel to Miami.

“They pay for these tours and experience. That’s the economic impact,” Sheppard said. The black-owned hotel Historic Hampton House was a safe haven for many Black celebrities and is now a nonprofit museum in the neighborhood of Brownsville in Miami.

Preservation also makes it tougher for the site to be rezoned and lose its history, Sheppard added.

In Liberty City, historical property site owners have the opportunity to apply for their property to become a designated preservation building. Once preserved, owners can qualify for property tax relief. If approved, the property will be frozen for a decade, said Christine Rupp, executive director of the Dade Heritage Trust.

Another benefit of becoming a historic site means if the property is sold, the new owner cannot tear the exterior of the building, which will then prevent gentrification, Rupp said.

The Trust conducted a report and identified hundreds of places in the predominantly Black neighborhood eligible for preservation at no cost. Now, Rupp is in early conversations with neighborhood leaders and the city, so they can do outreach to the community to educate them about preservation.

“We find it imperative that we work very hard to ensure that these historic places are preserved. It allows us to educate people,” Rupp said.

Such a project is essential, especially in Liberty City, to educate people about the history of the neighborhood, she said.

Liberty City was once a well-known area with thriving Black-owned businesses. But unlike many other Miami neighborhoods, homes in Liberty City aren’t decked out even for holidays like Halloween. Streets are littered, lack lighting in places and decorations are seen as an unaffordable expense.

The $100,000 preservation report — prepared by Miami-based Plusurbia Design — was made possible with a $50,000 matching grant from the State of Florida’s Division of Historic Preservation to the Trust in 2023. The Trust paid the other half.

Within a year, the Trust identified places eligible for historic designation, including the Liberty Square Community Center, Liberty Theater, Eureka Barber Shop and Mount Tabor Missionary Baptist Church.

For Marshall L. Davis, Sir., managing director and the namesake of the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, preserving the Center is more than just preserving its walls and bricks.

It’s about the opportunity to preserve the function of the Center, which provides affordable arts classes, including drama, dance, singing and sewing.

The Center is located in Liberty City and has been around for half a century. It was founded to allow communities of color access to a cultural art at an affordable price.

Davis said a bid for renovation has already been sent through the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. Davis said he will seek the opportunity to preserve the Center but is not sure how soon that will happen.

“We want to preserve the place so that people have that historical sense of what happened here,” he said.

A building may be designated under the city’s historic preservation code if it is architecturally significant, a well-known individual lived or conducted business there, or it was the site of a major community event. To be officially historically designated, a structure just needs to fulfill one of those requirements.

Future steps involve documentation, and then subsequently actual historic designation of a neighborhood, and possibly creation of a formal historic district. Such a plan would maintain the cultural integrity of a community, the architectural fabric, and would in the long run prevent gentrification, Rupp said.

Neighborhoods, such as Little Havana, Little Haiti, are rapidly changing because the City of Miami has not integrated historic preservation in their future planning, Rupp added.

The Trust originally became interested in Liberty City after carrying out a comparable study in Brownsville that described Miami’s segregationist governmental practices, Rupp said.

“We have found that for our work, it’s really important to get into these diverse neighborhoods — neighborhoods of color,” Rupp said.

Liberty City was erected between 1922 and 1940. Black people relocated there because it made it possible for them to purchase properties, something they were unable to accomplish in other areas of the city, the preservation report says.

There were a slew of Black-owned businesses and homes from 1936 until 1968. But that was cut short when the neighborhood destabilized in the 1960s.

“The completion of I-95 and I-395 in 1967 resulted in displacement of tens of thousands of Black residents of Overtown,” the report says.

Other historic preservation reports besides Liberty City include Silver Bluff, Shenandoah, and Allapattah’s Little Santo Domingo District.

“The end goal is to assure, always, in every neighborhood in Miami that there’s a bit of historic fabric that remains, so people understand how the area evolved,” Rupp said.

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 BIILY JEAN LOUIS | blouis@miami4th.org

BIILY JEAN LOUIS is the senior editor of the Key Biscayne Independent. A native of Port Au Prince, Haiti, Jean Louis  has worked for Bloomberg and the Baltimore Sun. He is a corps member of Report for America